Topics created by GregW

@gregw

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@gregw I think this is sensible, I would fully support it if it could be shown to stand up to formal legal scrutiny, in the sense of constitutionality. I’m not a constitutional scholar by any means, it would be advantageous to have this kind of language drafted by a competent team of constitutional lawyers if possible (if it wasn’t already). My concern is the same as before, that if it’s not very carefully approached, it could lead to rulings that become very prohibitive to reform efforts. The less possibility of any kind of constitutional challenge, the (very much) better.

@lime said in State constitutions that require “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes.:

Yes, many state laws and include clauses specifying which parts are intended to be severable.

Good that using severability is not be legally controversial when changing state law. "If not Score than Approval" would be a legally reasonable provision in a voting reform law.

@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

... So then shouldn't we be encouraging voters to give preferences as close to honesty as possible, to make sure we have as little error as possible?

No, in my opinion, we shouldn't. That's asking them to play the sucker, in the presence of a voting system that can get, I think, the right answer in case no party plays sucker. The proper use of Score Voting is to apply a tactic to maximize the expected value of the outcome. And I doubt whether STAR behaves significantly differently. It's just extra complexity for no gain.

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

"Honest voting" is a theoretical concept that can be useful in thought experiments and reasoning and the design of algorithms, etc. However, it does not describe a phenomenon that can happen in real elections in which something important rides on the outcome of the tally.

$20 says it does.

How are we going to test that? With the voters experiencing how many elections where the outcome matters to them? And how are we going to measure the importance of an election?

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

What grounds do you have for coming to such an opinion? I don't think it is correct.

I think that's just the definition of the "best result" under a given metric. Regardless of what social welfare function you pick, that social welfare function will be maximized if voters are honest.

What do you care about? Electing majority winners? A Condorcet method will always elect a Condorcet winner if voters are honest (but not necessarily if they're dishonest). Maximizing social utility? Score voting does that with honest voters (but not always for dishonest voters). Maximizing the number of voters who see their favorite candidate elected? FPP does that with honest voters (but once again, can't with dishonest ones).

No matter which social welfare function you come up with, that social welfare function will do better at its job if it has accurate information than if it has inaccurate information.

The input doesn't have to be accurate information about what the voters want. It suffices, in the case of Score Voting, if it is accurate information about the voter's tactical choice. If just one side votes "honestly" and the other is trying to maximize value, the result will be wrong and will skew to the side that is using the tactic. However, I contend that when all sides are using their respective best tactic, the "pull" balances out and the result will be the same as though all were "honest". The reason to think this is that the system is additive and balanced.

To paraphrase WDS: consider a voting system in which a vote consists of 32 bits. The tally takes the XOR of the ballots and then takes the result modulo the count of candidates to get the index of the winning candidate. How do I cast an "honest" vote in this system?

Where you start talking about strategy, I'm not sure whether you mean for voters or for those who decide who should run for office. I see that later on, you make clear that you are talking about it for voters.

I am not sure that voting strategy for Approval has been so well studied as to merit advising voters as to what strategy they should use.

This much is known: approving everyone you like never hurts.

Now I will get into my own opinion, not necessarily shared by the other participants in this forum. Suppose there is a candidate who is not among your top favorites but you like her a little bit better than you like Hitler, who is also running, and moreover, you feel that your favorite candidates are not popular with the other voters. Should you approve that compromise candidate? I think you should choose at random. My reasoning is that if many voters do that, that candidate will receive a partial level of support from those voters, not full support.

You misspell "criterion" as ending with "m".

For what it may be worth, here is some argumentation in favor of switching from Choose-one Plurality Voting to Approval Voting that I sent to someone. I don't know whether you will judge that it will help in your purposes of communication to use ideas from it, take it verbatim, or neither.

A voter should be the one to determine which candidates her or his vote supports and opposes. Your committees claimed to be addressing the reasons that the general public has no power in the voting booth, but they ignored the elephant in the room, which is the non-respect of this right. In an N-candidate election for a single seat or office, voters who want to oppose fewer than N - 1 are told to lump it. They are denied the right to cast a vote that reflects their political judgment. But other voters, the ones who want to support exactly one candidate and oppose the rest, get to cast the vote that reflects their judgment. So the system denies the voters equality of influence, one voter to another. This creates a Prisoner's Dilemma that gives people the false impression that they have an incentive to support a "lesser evil" that has money support or fame. The false impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The false impression commands mindshare via the effects of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). It is described over and over again as "realistic" and "math". This can all be defeated by providing equality in the voting booth, one voter to another, which should be provided anyway because it is a right in a representative republic. Even for someone who doesn't grasp how the PD distorts people's mentalities and social interactions, the question should remain relevant, of what grounds there are to tell someone what vote to cast instead of leaving it to the voter. What grounds are there to accept some voters' votes the way they want to cast them, but tell others, no, you can't vote the way you feel or judge. You have to choose from options that don't correspond to your political stance. This is not more moral than excluding some voters because of their color. It's a different rule of discrimination, but it is still an immoral form of discrimination.

Another point in favor of Approval is the standard set down by a majority opinion of the Supreme Court of the US in Wesberry vs. Sanders, 1964. The "weight and worth of the citizens' votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same." So Choose-one Plurality is unconstitutional in the US.

@lime said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:

Although, I will say SPAV with Jefferson is probably a better system for a primary than something like PAV, because a primary should always select the candidates with the most votes; the goal is to maximize the probability that the best candidate will make it to the runoff, rather than optimizing the average overall representativeness.
Also, I think SPAV is fairly simple, but might be too complicated for a simple primary compared to cumulative voting. (Also also, any Condorcet winner should probably be guaranteed a spot.)

Yes, the idea is to nominate the best candidate, average overall representativeness could result in a boring general election.

I think voters would like cumulative voting. There would be a slight possibility of a strategic block voting campaign. If a party had that enough support to pull that off they would probably win the general election in any event.